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More "Degradation" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... on its eastern and northern borders, and its walls and legions at last gave way. It had not been a kind mother to the nations it had conquered—in war it had been cruel, and in peace it had been selfish and stern. The lust of rule became stronger as its arm became weaker. The degradation of slavery and the heavy hand of the tax-gatherer were extending even to Wales. The barbarian invader found the effeminate, luxurious empire an easy prey. In 410 Alaric and his host of Goths appeared before the city of Rome itself; ...
— A Short History of Wales • Owen M. Edwards
... then softened for a moment, while his lips quivered; but his hard, cynical, bitter aspect and tones came back—the manner born of years of misery and degradation, and he ...
— First in the Field - A Story of New South Wales • George Manville Fenn
... he envied also the miserable sallow, thin-faced loafers blinking their obscene eyes and rubbing their greasy shoulders against the doorjambs of the Black Horse pub, because they were too far gone to feel their degradation. ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... The Argus, December 16) informs us that observation and the remarks he has heard made by factory girls have led him to think that there are three serious objections which the seamstresses have to domestic service. One of these is—"The idea of degradation, attached to the position of a 'slavey' in the minds of the lower classes themselves." As we have seen that there is nothing degrading in the work itself which servants are called upon to do, how comes it that its performance is considered less honourable than sewing or serving in a ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny
... be? What will it leave of things visible? Will it leave a London preserved and beautified, or will it but add abundantly to the lumps of dishonest statuary, the scars and masses of ill-conceived rebuilding which testify to the aesthetic degradation of the Victorian period? Will a great constellation of artists redeem the ambitious sentimentalities and genteel skilfulness that find their fitting mausoleum in the Tate Gallery? Will our literature escape at last from pretentiousness and timidity, our philosophy from ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... tolerance shown them. After that their existence was troubled by riots, and broken in upon by expulsions. The schools, of old so flourishing, fell into a state of utter decay. About 1360 France could not count six Jewish scholars, and the works of the time show to what degree of degradation rabbinical studies had sunk. With the expulsion of 1394 Charles VI dealt the finishing stroke. Thereafter French Judaism was nothing but the shadow of itself. Having received a mortal wound in 1306, its life up to the final expulsion in 1394 ...
— Rashi • Maurice Liber
... from me that night when she told me that she was a contaminated creature, unfit to be the associate of an honest man Oh, Margaret, Margaret! poverty must indeed be a bitter school if it has prepared you for such degradation ...
— Henry Dunbar - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... of guard-houses, at a multitude of town gates, and on every drawbridge, angle, and rampart, of a complete system of fortifications. Fifty times a day, I got down to harangue an infuriated soldiery about the Bottle. Through the filthy degradation of the abject and vile Roman States, I had as much difficulty in working my way with the Bottle, as if it had bottled up a complete system of heretical theology. In the Neapolitan country, where everybody was a spy, a soldier, a priest, or a lazzarone, the shameless beggars of ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... labour, that through her and hers he might be haunted by fears and misfortunes, and at the last die in misery. Looking back upon the past it would certainly seem that there had been virtue in this curse, for already through Lysbeth and his dealings with her, he had suffered the last degradation and the toil, which could not be called light, of nearly fourteen years of daily occupation ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... of Islam was stayed whenever military success was checked. The Faith was meant for Arabia and not for the world, hence it is constitutionally incapable of change or development. The degradation of woman hinders the growth of freedom and ...
— Two Old Faiths - Essays on the Religions of the Hindus and the Mohammedans • J. Murray Mitchell and William Muir
... that his sense of reality had always remained in a rudimentary state; it was, as it were, diffused over the world and mankind. For instance, his belief in the misery and degradation of earthly life, and the natural bestiality of man, was incurable; but of this or that individual he had no opinion; he was to John Norton a blank sheet of paper, to which he could not affix even a title. His childhood had been one of tumult and sorrow; the different ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... becomes so by the voluntary adoption of the lower forces as the guide of life. Nature has her own decalogue. There is a law written upon our hearts. The wasting of power by anger, jealousy, envy, covetousness and the like, and the degradation following their expression in acts of revenge, concupiscence, and mere rapacity, are known without revelation by all races which have not suffered the downward evolution. The literatures prove this ...
— The Things Which Remain - An Address To Young Ministers • Daniel A. Goodsell
... Should it ever again appear to you to be necessary to use your zeal for the protection of your husband or your child, do not endeavour to dissuade a woman by trying to make her think that she, by her alliance, would bring degradation into any house, or to any man. If there could have been an argument powerful with me, to make me do that which you wished to prevent, it was the argument which you used. But my own comfort, and the happiness of another person whom I value almost as ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... saw the "Star of the West" gradually fade away and disappear into that threatening storm and darkness—unconscious that she was to emerge again to play so important a part in the drama of the nation's degradation,—the same observer saw the same omen at Niblo's not long ago, when the poor Jewess of Miss Bateman's wonderful "Leah" fell back step by step into the crowd, as the curtain was dropping, her last hope withered and her last duty ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... so distasteful, that she would certainly have discarded him upon that one ground of offence, had not her love of power been unconsciously propitiated by the perception of the efforts which he made, and the degradation to which he submitted, in the vain attempt to please her. She liked the homage offered to "les beaux yeux de sa cassette" pretty much as a young beauty likes the devotion extorted by her charms, and for the sake of the incense tolerated ...
— Aunt Deborah • Mary Russell Mitford
... yesterday, when I felt that to be "a pot-hunter"[1] was the lowest step of degradation; and I was quite right, for then I lived at home; my father had an admirable kennel of pointers and spaniels, a couple of well-stocked manors, and a zealous keeper. But, since then, "a change came o'er the spirit of my dream," and my finances ...
— Confessions of an Etonian • I. E. M.
... is the more dignified word socially, but may express greater moral degradation. Vend is used of the petty (as that which can be carried about in a wagon), and may suggest the pettily dishonest. "That man would his country." "We shall a million dollars' worth of goods." "The hucksters ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... and my soul is filled with shame, when I think of the degradation of French patriotism contained in the utterances of . . . ., of those words which, to our lasting sorrow, evoked in the Centre of the Chamber an outburst of enthusiasm. May our patriots never forget this cowardly session of the French Parliament! Thus, then, twenty-seven ...
— The Schemes of the Kaiser • Juliette Adam
... in 1859, was a step in the work of lifting up woman to her true position. Formerly, marriage had been deemed something too unholy for a bishop; and the consequence was the general degradation of the sex. The entrance of the gospel corrected public sentiment on this point; and that act of the bishop only gave expression to the popular conviction that marriage is honorable in all, even the highest and holiest, nurturing some of the loveliest graces of the Christian character. The ...
— Woman And Her Saviour In Persia • A Returned Missionary
... that no human eye beheld her in this deep degradation of woe! For in the madness of her anguish, she rolled on the floor, and tore the clothing from her shoulders and the dark hair from her head! She uttered such groans and cries as are seldom heard on this earth—such as perhaps fill the ...
— The Lost Lady of Lone • E.D.E.N. Southworth
... in my power!" he thought exultantly. "Through what sloughs of degradation will I drag her before I deliver her ...
— The Honor of the Name • Emile Gaboriau
... sense, found a single convert among the nations: Christianity means nothing to the masses but a sensational public execution which is made an excuse for other executions. In its name we take ten years of a thief's life minute by minute in the slow misery and degradation of modern reformed imprisonment with as little remorse as Laud and his Star Chamber clipped the ears of Bastwick and Burton. We dug up and mutilated the remains of the Mahdi the other day exactly as we dug up and mutilated ...
— Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion • George Bernard Shaw
... had not half so much disfigured as that which she herself had applied inwardly, had begun to remind him of the face he had long ago loved a little, but this only made him, if possible, yet more determined that not one shilling of his father's money should go to the degradation of his mother. That she lusted and desired to have, was the worst of reasons why she should obtain! A compelled temperance was of course in itself worthless, but that alone could give opportunity for the waking of what soul was left her. Puny as it was, that might then begin to grow; it ...
— Heather and Snow • George MacDonald
... know that thin Malacca cane in the hall? Yes, you do. Well, my dear, the law says it is an assault to thrash a boy, and that he ought to be left to the law to punish, which means prison and degradation. I'm going to take that cane, my dear, and defy ...
— Quicksilver - The Boy With No Skid To His Wheel • George Manville Fenn
... the ramparts of a modern rule frowned down upon the solitary tower, as if in the vain insolence with which present power looks upon past decay,—the living race upon ancestral greatness. And indeed, in this respect, rightly! for modern times have no parallel to that degradation of human dignity stamped upon the ancient world by the long sway of the Imperial Harlot, all slavery herself, yet all tyranny to earth; and, like her own Messalina, at once ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... They sacrifice to Mari, as the goddess who sends and takes away cholera and all epidemic diseases. There is good ground for the opinion that these outcasts are the descendants of the original inhabitants of the country, and that they have been subjected to degradation by a succession of conquerors. Their invaders found them with a creed, and certain customs to avert diseases, with which they have never interfered. Hence the present practice. After the Goobbe procession had waited a long time, fifteen buffaloes ...
— Old Daniel • Thomas Hodson
... to woman was one common in antiquity. In the Hindoo laws of Manu it is said regarding woman: "The source of dishonor is woman; the source of strife is woman; the source of earthly existence is woman; therefore avoid woman." Beside this degradation of woman, fear of her ever and anon reappears naively. Manu further sets forth: "Woman is by nature ever inclined to tempt man; hence a man should not sit in a secluded place even with his nearest female relative." Woman, accordingly, is, according to the Hindoo as well as the Old ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... time, in the wrong place, and the daughters because he may be personal about them, as the time before. ERNEST is annoyed that there should be this speech at all when there is such a much better one coming, and BROCKLEHURST foresees the degradation of the peerage. All are thinking of themselves alone save CRICHTON, who knows his master's weakness, and fears he may stick in the middle. LORD LOAM, however, advances cheerfully to his doom. He sees ERNEST'S stool, ...
— The Admirable Crichton • J. M. Barrie
... to find herself despised by this young man, who would, in all probability, very speedily learn, or who had perhaps already learned, the story of her degradation. ...
— Run to Earth - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... indifference with which he alluded to his former situation in life, struck me with astonishment, and created a curiosity to know more of his adventures; he had, I found, brought himself to his present degradation by a passion for gaming and driving, which had usurped every just and moral feeling. His father, I have since learned, felt his conduct deeply, and had been dead some time. His venerable mother having advanced him all her remaining property, was now reduced to a dependence upon the benevolence ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... first they might have considered custom as a tyrant; but when they have obeyed her for a certain time, they do her voluntary homage ever after, as to a sovereign by divine right. To prevent this species of intellectual degradation, we must in education be careful to rank mere mechanical talents below the exercise of the mental powers. Thus the ambition of young people will be directed to high objects, and all inferiour qualifications may be attained without ...
— Practical Education, Volume II • Maria Edgeworth
... soft, sweet repose among the cottage homes, felt like cold death beneath these ashy walls. To Joan, the workhouse was a word of shame unutterable. Those among whom she lived would hurl the word against enemies as a prophecy of the utmost degradation. She shivered as she passed, and was sad, knowing that a whole world of poverty, failure, sorrow, regret, was hidden away in that cold, still pile. But the hand of sleep lay softly there; only a sick soul or two stirred, the paupers were the equal of princes ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... she should be spared the degradation you propose. She is a girl of culture, highly educated. You cannot condemn her ...
— The Thin Red Line; and Blue Blood • Arthur Griffiths
... a constant struggle there is going on here below. Some aim at "fortune's gaudy show," while others strive to catch the wreath of fame, and crown themselves with that. Few are so indifferent, unless besotted by ignorance and degradation, as not to aspire, in some shape or other, to something more or better than they ever had, or better than others have; and, in this age of the world—at any rate in this country—money seems to be esteemed the chief good. Not the miser's money, for, while that is locked up, and he hoards, and hoards, ...
— A Biographical Sketch of the Life and Character of Joseph Charless - In a Series of Letters to his Grandchildren • Charlotte Taylor Blow Charless
... connection, is that while the law of Conservation is doubtless true, so far as it goes, there is also in operation another law, well known to physicists, called the law of the Degradation of Energy, which asserts that energies of a higher order are constantly being converted into energies of a lower order. This law maintains that energies of a lower order cannot be reconverted into energies of a higher order. All other energies are ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... What will become of her? She will not be able to sustain this degradation ... No! Death is a thousand times better than these hellish tortures of ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... Triangles—unless he is a professional scientist, when he can begin to specialise in mathematics at the same age as the lawyer begins to specialise in law or the surgeon in anatomy—than for him to be an expert in Choctaw, the Cabala or the Book of Mormon. I look back with feelings of shame and degradation to the days when, for the sake of a crust of bread, I prostituted my intelligence to wasting the precious hours of impressionable childhood, which could have been filled with so many beautiful and meaningful things, over this utterly futile and inhuman subject. It trains the mind—it teaches ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... their tops are now a dome, now a flat table or a spire, as harder or softer strata are reached in their slow degradation, while the sides, with all their fine moldings, are being steadily undermined and eaten away. But no essential change in style or color is thus effected. From century to century they stand the same. What seems confusion among the rough earthquake-shaken crags nearest one ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir
... The degradation of the Jewish rulers was even greater. With all their knowledge of the moral law, they who professed to be special representatives of God put to death his Son, and chose a murderer instead of the Saviour. To the tragedy of such a choice Luke refers with ...
— The Gospel of Luke, An Exposition • Charles R. Erdman
... precedence are by marriage, age, and profession. Lastly, in placing your guests, regard is rather to be had to birth than fortune; for, though purse-pride is forward enough to exalt itself, it bears a degradation with more secret comfort and ease than the former, as being more inwardly satisfied with itself, and less apprehensive of neglect ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... which she had believed to be Spanish, but which she could now trace to such a different origin. In a moment, and for ever, her girlish vanity fell from her. She felt as if her beauty were but the badge of degradation and misery. And then there came the keen instinct of resentment—it was to her mother, whom she loved, that she owed this intolerable suffering. Crouching down and shivering, as if with cold, she yielded to the storm of thought which swept ...
— A Canadian Heroine, Volume 1 - A Novel • Mrs. Harry Coghill
... most devoted daughter and sister, an unwearied watcher by lingering deathbeds; that to prolonged and unrelaxing attendance on the sick the malady that now poisoned her own life owed its origin; that to one wretched relative she had been a support and succour in the depths of self-earned degradation, and that it was still her hand which kept him from utter destitution. Miss Helstone stayed the whole evening, omitting to pay her other intended visit; and when she left Miss Mann it was with the ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... this system is treading no new road, it is only proceeding on the old. Its central law is that of destroying any value, however great, for the sake of any gratification, however small. Accustomed to battening on the hopes of humanity,—accustomed to taking stock in human degradation, and declaring dividends upon enforced ignorance and crime,—existing only while every canon of the common law is annulled, and every precept of morals and civilization set at nought,—could it be expected to pause just when, or rather just because, it had apparently found the richest possible ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... trying. Mrs. Miller was also encouraged by the intense feeling of her father on the question of woman's dress. To him the whole revolution in woman's position turned on her dress. The long skirt was the symbol of her degradation. ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... these vaults that were still in position were utilized by the adjoining farmer as shelter for his calves, the floor being spread with straw, amid which the young creatures rustled, cooling their thirsty tongues by licking the quaint Norman carving, which glistened with the moisture. It was a degradation of even such a rude form of art as this to be treatad so grossly, she thought, and for the first time the family of Fitzpiers assumed in her imagination the hues ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... protection of the traveller, but mainly for the protection of the Magistrate; for, should a traveller provided with a passport receive any injury, the Magistrate of the district would be liable to degradation. It was arranged, therefore, with the convert that, on our arrival in Tak-wan-hsien, I was to give the chairen, if satisfied with his services, 200 cash (five pence); but, if he said "gowshun! gowshun!" (a little more! a little more!) ...
— An Australian in China - Being the Narrative of a Quiet Journey Across China to Burma • George Ernest Morrison
... aunt in her terrible voice, and freed herself from his hold like an offended goddess. "O heaven, I might have known that you, George, would have abetted my poor, wilful boy in his dirt and bodily viciousness, and that you, Jervas, would have condoned his turpitude and moral degradation. None the less, though you both desert me in this dreadful hour, shirking your duty thus shamelessly, this woman's hand shall pluck my dear, loved nephew from the abyss, this hand—" Here, turning to behold me, my poor aunt shivered, gasped ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... gave up expostulation or complaint in this matter. "I will hold my tongue," she had said, and she kept her word. For more than two years she held an utter silence to him; living under the same roof, witnessing day by day his ever-deepening degradation, no syllable crossed her lips to him. Since she could not (for the sake of those she loved and might comfort) refuse the loathsome daily touch and presence of sin, she endured it, but would have no fellowship therewith. She had no right over it, it none over her. She looked ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... to wander along the coast, when formed of moderately hard rocks, and mark the process of degradation. The tides in most cases reach the cliffs only for a short time twice a day, and the waves eat into them only when they are charged with sand or pebbles; for there is good evidence that pure water effects nothing ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... the degradation of the religious idea was in popular practice complete. But under the confused accents of superstition the science of our age is succeeding in catching from afar the vibrations of a sublime utterance. In the ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... political neighbors. In the ancient world, slaves were constantly being educated, freed, and made equal to their masters; but in the confederacy, everything is done to crush them lower and lower; and in these facts lie perdu the future further degradation of every poor white in the South, the constant increase of power and capital in the hands of a few, and the diminution in number even of ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... and sifted throughly let them stoop and fawn at pleasure, Little reck I to revenge me better for their former spite As I mark their degradation falling on them in full measure When they humble themselves vilely, thus, to ...
— Eidolon - The Course of a Soul and Other Poems • Walter R. Cassels
... distinguished from former methods, either of discipline or recreation, the present tenor of our general teaching fosters in the mind of youth;—teaching which asserts liberty to be a right, and obedience a degradation; and which, regardless alike of the fairness of nature and the grace of behavior, leaves the insolent spirit and degraded senses to find their only occupation in malice, and ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... the tendency to impurity in young men; and although I cannot tell them what I do not believe, I hanker sometimes after the old prohibitions and penalties. Physiological penalties are too remote, and the subtler penalties—the degradation, the growth of callousness to finer pleasures, the loss of sensitiveness to all that is most nobly attractive in woman—are too feeble to withstand temptation when it lies in ambush like a garrotter, and has the reason ...
— The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford • Mark Rutherford
... with the course of these Poems, it will be superfluous; and will, I fear, be thrown away upon that other class, whose besotted admiration of the intoxicated despot hereafter placed in contrast with him is the most melancholy evidence of degradation in British feeling and intellect which the times ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... beauty and harmony of inanimate Nature with the human degradation and deformity before me, I felt, as I confess I had never done before, the truth of a remark of a rare thinker, that "Nature is loved as the city of God, although, or rather because, it has no citizen. The beauty of ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... read some of it, and felt a profound pity for the corpse that had to submit to such degradation. Here are four specimens, the first of which was marked, 'Especially suitable for a numerous family, who have lost an aged parent, gold ...
— Ridan The Devil And Other Stories - 1899 • Louis Becke
... consummating the darling project of his uncle. The terror of invasion has induced her to change the nature of her foreign policy. She will cling to the French alliance until the French emperor has satiated his national craving for her degradation; and not until he strikes her a blow, which will resound throughout the world, will England be prepared to battle with the Gaul. No future accession of territory would make France more formidable for the invasion of England than she is now. Her army of ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various
... you have the eye to see and the mind to appreciate, you will behold an illuminated canvas whereon is depicted, within the limited area of your vision, everything that a great city holds of wealth and poverty, beauty and ugliness, joy and sorrow, luxury and squalor, purity and degradation, truth and falsehood. It is all there, in this narrow environment, with the lights and the shadows meeting and blending, as the noise from below merges with the ...
— The Substitute Prisoner • Max Marcin
... she was so ugly; and you know there is something terribly, miserably pathetic in a certain smile, a certain sodden aspect of invitation on such faces. It is so terrible, that it is in a way sacred; it means the outside of degradation and (what is worst of all in life) false position. I hope you understand ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... loud as Musset is said to have done when she upbraided him with his ungratefulness to her, who had been devoted to him to the utmost bounds of self-abnegation, to the sacrifice of her noblest impulses, to the degradation of her ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... figure than her heart sank at once to an unknown depth unknown before and unfathomable now. She was cowering over the fire her head sunk in her hands, so crouching, that the line of neck and shoulders instantly conveyed to Fleda the idea of fancied or felt degradation there was no escaping it how, whence, what, was all wild confusion. But the language of mere attitude was so unmistakable the expression of crushing pain was so strong, that, after Fleda had fearfully made her way ...
— Queechy, Volume II • Elizabeth Wetherell
... these evils are more closely connected with the mind than with the body. The term "flesh" is obviously used in a sense coextensive with the tendencies and means by which we are exposed to guilt and degradation. These personifications, it will therefore be seen, are employed with general rhetorical looseness, not with definite ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... Nefert's brother had gambled away the mummy of his father, how enormous was the sum he had lost, and that degradation must overtake Katuti, and ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... of the Negro is the symptom of an animus which has its roots imbedded in the past. It does not mark a revival, but rather the supreme desperate effort of the spirit of tyranny to compass the political subjection and consequent social degradation of the black man. Its provocation does not consist in any abnormal or perilous condition in southern communities arising from a numerical preponderance of Negroes. It is not made to meet a merely temporary emergency with the intent to return to the principles of republican government upon ...
— The Disfranchisement of the Negro - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 6 • John L. Love
... In three years, four years at most, it would be all over. And then would come debts and desperate expedients, the ragged gowns and old shoes of poor artists' households. Or else the lover, the keeper, that is to say slavery and degradation. ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... married martyrdom, would never have sought that first meeting with her cousin. Yet she was not to be judged upon that fact alone. She was a devoted mother. She had been a faithful wife to a man who had lowered his manhood to a level beneath that of the very beasts. She had borne with him through degradation, insult, once or twice physical violence; and this not only because Russian orthodoxy gives no quarter to a rebellious wife, whatever the provocation. But when that time arrived when her duty to her children ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... the streets, elbowed him against the wall, or humorously insisted on his company, discomposed and frightened him. He had known rude companionship before, but it was serious, practical, and under control. There was something in this vulgar degradation of intellect and power—qualities that Clarence had always boyishly worshiped—which sickened and disillusioned him. Later on a pistol shot in a crowd beyond, the rush of eager men past him, the disclosure of a limp and helpless figure ...
— A Waif of the Plains • Bret Harte
... the caprice of the master, he was treated to various applications of the lash, and restricted allowances of his miserable rations. His slavery was the most abject, his misery the most consummate, and his degradation the most venal and depraved: he was the image of the man without the mental spark; the human being in semblance, but the brute ...
— Fern Vale (Volume 1) - or the Queensland Squatter • Colin Munro
... ignorant multitude? They scorn our people's ignorant observance; but the most accursed ignorance is that which has no observance—sunk to the cunning greed of the fox, to which all law is no more than a trap or the cry of the worrying hound. There is a degradation deep down below the memory that has withered into superstition. In the multitudes of the ignorant on three continents who observe our rites and make the confession of the divine Unity, the soul of Judaism is not dead. Revive ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... predecessor have been inserted. Pendent from it is the fine Chandelier of wrought iron and brass, presented to the church in 1680 by Dorothy Applebee, who was buried within the sanctuary two years later. This chandelier had been transferred to the choir during the degradation of the old church, in which position it was by no means without precedent in ancient churches, but its original place here was in the tower, to which it ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: Southwark Cathedral • George Worley
... did not appoint the expedition, but merely allowed it: Scipio did not obtain half the resources which had formerly been placed at the command of Regulus, and he got that very corps which for years had been subjected by the senate to intentional degradation. The African army was, in the view of the majority of the senate, a forlorn hope of disrated companies and volunteers, the loss of whom in any event the state had no ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... really faces the fact of the evil," said Father Payne; "but he must not believe in a muddled sort of way, with a sort of abject timidity, that God may have brought about his weakness or his degradation. He ought to be quite clear that God wishes him to be free and happy and strong, and grieves, like Himself, over the miserable limitation. He must have no sort of doubt that God wishes him to be healthy or clean-minded. Then he can pray, he can strive for patience, he can fight his ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... the white people of Apia lay in the worst squalor of degradation. They are now unspeakably improved, both men and women. To-day they must be called a more than fairly respectable population, and a much more than fairly intelligent. The whole would probably not fill the ranks of even an English half-battalion, yet there are a surprising ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... pages. Accordingly, though he was no chartist or radical, I consider Carlyle's by far the most indignant comment or protest anent the fruits of feudalism to-day in Great Britain—the increasing poverty and degradation of the homeless, landless twenty millions, while a few thousands, or rather a few hundreds, possess the entire soil, the money, and the fat berths. Trade and shipping, and clubs and culture, and prestige, and guns, and a fine select class of gentry and ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... to her home, to her husband, as for refuge. Now she perceived that there was no refuge for her, no comfort in her despair, but rather another ordeal to be faced. She would have to tell her husband the truth, so far as she knew it. Good God! Why could she not shake off from her soul the degradation, the burning shame of this fair flesh of hers, and return to him with some other body, however homely, which should be hers and hers alone? She remembered that the man she loathed had said that Ian would not be back in England until ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... presence of all his officers Poniatowski wrote to the King as plainly as he dared: "News is here going through the camp which surely must be spread by ill-disposed men who wish evil to Your Majesty, as though Your Majesty would treat with the betrayers of our country. The degradation of cringing to the betrayers of our country would ...
— Kosciuszko - A Biography • Monica Mary Gardner
... love, and charity, becomes unholy to the world and unbearable to her. The holiest of all work for a mother is to care for her child. That child, so helpless now, is to reward her by acts of love and deeds of valor. Take away from woman her faith, let her feel that her work is a degradation, and there is nothing more beautiful in her attentions to a child than there would be in her attentions ...
— The True Woman • Justin D. Fulton
... though I feel it was both desperate and foolish, is not so very foolish, nor my safety here so utterly unprotected, as at first sight—and in this strange dress, it may appear to be. I have suffered enough, and more than enough, by the degradation of having been seen in this unfeminine attire, and the comments you must necessarily have made on my conduct—but I thank God that I am so far protected, that I could not have been subjected to insult unavenged." When this extraordinary explanation had proceeded thus far, the warder appeared, ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... distance, because the upper atmosphere is less dense and clouded with vapour: and hence it is that mountains of great elevation appear much nearer than they really are. From all these circumstances, it is evident that a simple scumbling or uniform degradation of local colours will not effect a true perspective—for this will be the arial of light and shade only—but such a subordination of hues and tints, as the various powers of colours require, and as is ...
— Field's Chromatography - or Treatise on Colours and Pigments as Used by Artists • George Field
... correspondence it was decided that I should begin the work at Beren's River among the Saulteaux Indians who lived there, and in little bands scattered along the eastern shores of that great lake, and in the interior, most of them in extreme poverty and superstitious degradation. A few of them, as the result of acquaintance with our Christian Indians of other places, were groping after the great Light, and trying to lift themselves up socially ...
— By Canoe and Dog-Train • Egerton Ryerson Young
... afterwards he regrets his folly," she said. "He clamors for the beautiful woman as a child might cry for the moon, and when he at last possesses her, he tires. Satisfied with having compassed her degradation, he exclaims: 'What shall I do with this beauty, which, because it is mine, now palls upon me? Let me kill it and forget it; I am aweary of love, and the world is full of women!' That is the way of your sex, ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... coffee advertising, as in publicity for other lines of trade and industry, began in the United States. Here too, it has been brought to its lowest degradation and to its highest efficiency. The entire process has taken ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... upon slavery in South America are very forcible, and also illustrate his own sympathetic nature. Here is one incident which struck him more than any story of cruelty, as showing the degradation of slavery. "I was crossing a ferry with a negro, who was uncommonly stupid. In endeavouring to make him understand, I talked loud, and made signs, in doing which I passed my hand near his face. He, I suppose, thought I was in a passion, and was going to strike him; for instantly, ...
— Life of Charles Darwin • G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany
... nobility) of a Norman house, and his Grace shall not be able to say nay to the infamous alliance. There is not an atom of Tom's slime, not a cubic inch of any pestilential gas in which he lives, not one obscenity or degradation about him, not an ignorance, not a wickedness, not a brutality of his committing, but shall work its retribution through every order of society up to the proudest of the proud and to the highest of the high. Verily, what with tainting, ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... boarding and lodging houses which single men frequent, a competition which, owing to the more healthful social environment of the Army hotel, is to be welcomed and approved of as a preventive of vice and degradation. The latter is often the result of crowded, uncleanly, workingmen's lodgings, which drive their occupants to the saloon. But the majority of the Army hotels are filled with the lowest class of men, out of any ...
— The Social Work of the Salvation Army • Edwin Gifford Lamb
... look at the vastness of this degradation. If I had been speaking of the population of a city, or town, or even a village, the tale would be a sad and melancholy one. But I have brought before you the condition of millions of women. And when you think that the masses ...
— The American Missionary, Vol. XLII. April, 1888. No. 4. • Various
... as he was ordered; and it was not till we had got to such a distance that there was little fear of his being hit, that I saw him jump down to release his companions. It was with a sense of misery and degradation I have never before experienced, that I watched till we lost sight of the ...
— Peter the Whaler • W.H.G. Kingston
... in fact practically all the qualifications necessary for a good practitioner of our art. He had, eminently, that gift which the Romans called facundia and the French can translate, if with a slight degradation of meaning, by faconde; but for which we, though the adjective "facund" has, one believes, been tried, possess no noun, "Eloquence" being too much specified to "fine" writing or speaking. "Facility of expression" perhaps comes ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... N. deterioration, debasement; wane, ebb; recession &c 287; retrogradation &c 283 [Obs.]; decrease &c 36. degeneracy, degeneration, degenerateness; degradation; depravation, depravement; devolution; depravity &c 945; demoralization, retrogression; masochism. impairment, inquination^, injury, damage, loss, detriment, delaceration^, outrage, havoc, inroad, ravage, scath^; perversion, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... was not a very hard life to bear, while I was a thief. It was only when they had taught me at the reformatory to feel my own degradation, and to try for better things, that the days grew long and weary. Thoughts of the future forced themselves on me now. I felt the dreadful reproach that honest people—even the kindest of honest people—were to me in themselves. A heart-breaking sensation ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... as she might to avoid it, the alms-house, with its debased and debasing society, was ever before her eyes as her ultimate destiny. It was in vain that she endeavored to prepare her mind for this result. She could endure any degree of privation, but not degradation and infamy. ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various
... maintain decent appearances upon an income below that enjoyed by many artisans—what goes, in the one case, for the decent appearances, being enjoyed in substantial comforts in the other, or else misapplied, to the degradation of body ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 445 - Volume 18, New Series, July 10, 1852 • Various
... hopes and fears. The condition of women improves, undoubtedly, as a people advances towards civilization; but there is a period in the process, at which voluptuousness, more cruel than indifference, and often maddened by jealousy, subjects her to greater degradation than her original insignificance, and destroys all hope of her amelioration in the tyranny of her own licentiousness. It is only where the principle alluded to, is publicly recognised in the civil institutions of a country, and conscientiously reverenced by the piety of its citizens, that ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr
... observers. All those creeping things that riot in the decay of nobler natures hastened to their repast; and they were right; they did after their kind. It is not every day that the savage envy of aspiring dunces is gratified by the agonies of such a spirit, and the degradation of such a name. The unhappy man left his country forever. The howl of contumely followed him across the sea, up the Rhine, over the Alps; it gradually waxed fainter; it died away; those who had raised it began to ask each other, what, after all, was the ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... relation." To the same purpose are the pertinent words of Alford: "To endeavor to evade the work which he has appointed for each man, by refusing the bounty to save the trouble of seeking the grace, is an attempt which must ever end in degradation of the individual motives and in social demoralization, whatever present apparent effects may follow ...
— Amusement: A Force in Christian Training • Rev. Marvin R. Vincent.
... from[72]" the Saxon queens. We have no instance of a female coronation in England until so late as the year 978, in the reign of Ethelred II.[73]: that of Judith, therefore, was no revival of a discontinued custom. But a degradation of the consorts of the kings of Wessex in regard to the title of queen, and the right to sit in equal dignity with the king upon a throne, in consequence of the crime of Eadburga, is, perhaps, sufficiently established. Mr. Lingard, whose accuracy as an historian ...
— Coronation Anecdotes • Giles Gossip
... as I have said, grown disgusted with the consular name, and desiring either that men of plebeian birth should be admitted to the office or its authority be restricted, the nobles, to prevent its degradation in either of these two ways, proposed a middle course, whereby four tribunes, who might either be plebeians or nobles, were to be created with consular authority. This compromise satisfied the commons, who thought they would thus get rid of the consulship, ...
— Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius • Niccolo Machiavelli
... strove to acquire that resignation to inevitable evils which alone could reconcile him to forego the promises of his youth, and enable him to view with patience a humiliation of Scotland, which blighted her honor, menaced her existence, and consigned her sons to degradation or obscurity. The latter was the choice of Wallace. Too noble to bend his spirit to the usurper, too honest to affect submission, he resigned himself to the only way left of maintaining the independence of a true Scot; and giving up the world at once, all ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... at a better perspective one of the leaning walls. Down the steps of the building came a young man who seemed to epitomize its degradation, squalor and infelicity—a narrow-chested, pale, unsavory young man, puffing at ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... as if she had told him, that it had been done in one of her father's fits of drunken passion. He had seen this sort of thing before during his sojourn in the mining districts. But, shamefully repulsive as it had been to him, he had never felt the degradation of it as fiercely as ...
— That Lass O' Lowrie's - 1877 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... to be supposed that slavery, at this stage, is so oppressive even to those who have been deprived of their freedom. The feeling of moral degradation which slavery, abstraction even made of its abuses, awakens in us, is unknown in a very uncivilized age.(406) The child willingly obeys the orders of strangers, and is hired out to service by his parents etc. The want or craving for liberty keeps pace with the intellectual ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... Mississippi, and her great city with an unrivalled location, what an imperial destiny lies before her, with the Union preserved? Oh! if she would only fully realize these great truths, and spurn from her embrace the wretched traitors who, while falsely professing peace, mean the degradation of the North and the dissolution of this Union, who can assign limits to ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... attachment which aroused it: and she was conscious that she had but shown obedience to his wishes throughout the day, not sympathy with his feelings. Under cover of a patient desire to please she had nursed irritation and jealousy; the degradation of the sense of jealousy increasing the irritation. Having consented to the ride to Dr. Shrapnel, should she not, to be consistent, have dismounted there? O half heart! A whole one, though it be an erring, like ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... girls in this reform school as compared with the one thousand boys, proved clearly that women, there as elsewhere, are either the best or the worst of the human race. When a girl cuts loose from the angel she was intended to be, she usually descends to the lowest possible pit of degradation; as soon as this girl in question found there was nothing to be gained by her fiendish outbursts of fury, she cunningly changed her tactics with her pious teacher, and pretended to "be born again." She ostensibly chose the Bible for her favorite reading, prayed fervently, ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss
... her new-born infant upon her bosom, should be the object of trembling care and sympathy wherever she bears her tender burden, or stretches her aching limbs. The very outcast of the streets has pity upon her sister in degradation, when the seal of promised maternity is impressed upon her. The remorseless vengeance of the law, brought down upon its victim by a machinery as sure as destiny, is arrested in its fall at a word which reveals her transient claim ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... and paused, while the enemy within whispered words of seduction hard to be withstood. But now a second voice spoke in him also: a voice of mingled authority and pleading. Why not fling away both box and pellets, foregoing the final degradation, the final rapture, that every nerve in him clamoured for more imperatively than he ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... in the land to which they had been able to appeal for some sort of redress amid their grievances was the law courts. Now it was decreed that the courts should be dependent on the Volksraad. The Chief Justice protested against such a degradation of his high office, and he was dismissed in consequence without a pension. The judge who had condemned the reformers was chosen to fill the vacancy, and the protection of a fixed law was withdrawn ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... what it had done for him, but the old shame held his tongue. He did not want to bring up the old story. The fact that it had existed, and had written itself out in human passion, remained with him still as a personal and humiliating degradation. It was like a scar on his own body, a repulsive sore which he wished to keep out of sight, even from the eyes of the man who had been his salvation. The growth of this revulsion within him had kept pace with his physical improvement, and if at the end of these ten days Father Roland had spoken ...
— The Courage of Marge O'Doone • James Oliver Curwood
... possibilities of our lives. To a certain extent we are slaves to our heredity, but not by any means to any such extent as to make us hopeless, unless our heredity is miserably bad. To the great mass of us come larger potentialities than we ever develop, and such possibilities of degradation as, fortunately, few of us ever reach. Within an enormously wide range, man is the architect of his own fortune. Only such traits develop as find a stimulus in the environment. Accordingly, a very large proportion of ...
— The Meaning of Evolution • Samuel Christian Schmucker
... violin, while Dummer led off a procession which solemnly capered round the room in sundry stages of conscious awkwardness. Mr. Bultitude shuffled along somehow after the rest, with rebellion at his heart and a deep sense of degradation. "If my clerks were to see ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... men are excited about the crews gone to Paris, for fear they should be forcibly detained by the Sultaneh Franzaweeh, I assured them that they will all come home safe and happy, with a good backsheesh. Many of them think it a sort of degradation to be taken for the Parisians to stare at like an anteeka, a word which here means what our ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... arrangement. The English government had issued an order that officers holding the king's commission should rank provincial officers, and that provincial generals and field officers should have no rank when a general or field officer holding a royal commission was present. The degradation of being ranked by every whipper-snapper who might hold a royal commission by virtue, perhaps, of being the bastard son of some nobleman's cast-off mistress was more than the temper of George Washington ...
— George Washington, Vol. I • Henry Cabot Lodge
... which the world has sustained in the degradation of the helpful serpent. If the serpent had not been degraded, every Israelite would have been attended by two of kindly disposition, one of which might have been sent to the north, and the other to the south, to bring for its owner ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various
... summary of their results. The arguments recently advanced by the Duke of Argyll (33. 'Primeval Man,' 1869.) and formerly by Archbishop Whately, in favour of the belief that man came into the world as a civilised being, and that all savages have since undergone degradation, seem to me weak in comparison with those advanced on the other side. Many nations, no doubt, have fallen away in civilisation, and some may have lapsed into utter barbarism, though on this latter head I have ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... Tabard Inn with its good cheer and merry company, Langland goes to another inn on the next street; there he looks with pure eyes upon sad or evil-faced men and women, drinking, gaming, quarreling, and pictures a scene of physical and moral degradation. One must look on both pictures to know what an English inn was like in ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... might himself be enabled to pursue other conquests; but Dara refused to go, although advised by his nobles to accept the invitation. "I am willing to put myself to death," said he with emotion, "but I cannot submit to this degradation. I cannot go before him, and thus personally acknowledge his authority over me." Resolved upon this point, he wrote to Faur, one of the sovereigns of Ind, to request his assistance, and Faur recommended that he should pay him a visit for the purpose ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 1,Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... as if in fact she had been in reality an Indian. She had imbibed in childhood the feelings of her mother, who had taken the first step and repented it—of one who had deserted, but had not been adopted—who became an exile and remained an alien—who had bartered her birthright for degradation and death. It is natural that regret for the past and despair for the future should have been the burden of the mournful ditties of such a woman; that she who had mated without love, and lived ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... arrangements, they set off for Southampton, and took passage in the Trent, which was destined subsequently to play a prominent part in the tangled role of Diplomacy, and to furnish the most utterly humiliating of many chapters of the pusillanimity, sycophancy, and degradation of the Federal government. ...
— Macaria • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... adventurous spirits from Europe, what might we not hope to achieve, uncontrolled by these monarchs, whose dignity throws us at present into the shade—and, were they to remain here, and succeed in this expedition, would willingly consign us for ever to degradation and dependence?" ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... or esoteric meaning of the swastika-cross; why Aum is always typified by a circle; ancient forms of oath-taking and why; the source of sex-energy spiritual; how and where the idea of "blood-atonement" and vicarious sacrifice originated; the beginning of sex-degradation. ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad
... in life to think for long or seriously about these curious Things drifting by like cattle and sheep. Yet her brow contracted, and she drew herself together as they passed—a sort of shiver, to think that there should be such degradation in the world. Twice when they came along her side of the road she dropped pennies in front of them, which they picked up in a listless way, just glancing over the ear in the direction the money fell, and went on without so much as ...
— Amaryllis at the Fair • Richard Jefferies
... overwhelming. A certain number of men would have still stood by Mr. Ward, either from friendship or sympathy, or from independence of judgment, or from dislike of the policy of the Board; but they would have been greatly outnumbered. The degradation—the Board did not venture on the logical consequence, expulsion—was a poor and even ridiculous measure of punishment; to reduce Mr. Ward to an undergraduate in statu pupillari, and a commoner's ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... though a man of sixty, to appear on the stage in the contest of wit. This knight was a composer of mimes—a light kind of comedy, somewhat to be compared to the "entertainments" given by humorists at the present day. Julius Caesar obliged him to perform in person—an act of degradation—but afterwards gave him 500,000 sesterces, and restored him to his rank. This act of Caesar's has been regarded as having a political significance, but it may merely have shown his love of humour. He may have wished to bring out the talent ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... According to the Muslim version, Solomon's temporary degradation was in punishment for his taking as a concubine the daughter of an idolatrous king whom he had vanquished in battle, and, through her influence, bowing himself to "strange gods." Before going to the bath, one day, he gave this heathen beauty his signet to take care of, and in ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... play,[7] "The Editor," grapples with an equally modern and timely subject, viz., the license of the press. With terrible vividness he shows the misery, ruin, and degradation which result from the present journalistic practice of misrepresentation, sophistry, and defamation. It is a very dark picture he draws, with scarcely a gleam of light. The satire is savage; and the quiver of wrath is perceptible in many a sledge-hammer phrase. You feel that Bjoernson himself ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... was in a very disturbed state, bordering upon rebellion. In the early part of this year many provincial banks stopped payment, in consequence of a demand on them for gold, and, to complete the climax of this country's degradation and disgrace, an act of national bankruptcy was declared on the twenty-seventh day of February; an order in council being issued on that day, by virtue of which the Bank of England stopped payment ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 1 • Henry Hunt
... being. Confucius he considers to have held a lower religious position than his countrymen had already attained to. He also regards the worship of spirits and of ancestors as a later perversion and degradation of the original religion of one god. In these positions he is followed by Professor Giles, Oxford Proceedings, vol. i. p. ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... too, how his poverty, the degradation of his earlier life, attracted her. There was something insipid and tasteless to her, in the idea of a gentleman, a man who had gone the usual course through school and university. A certain violent sympathy, however, came up in her ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... judging only by Punch's pictures, and that a little narrowly, has thought otherwise. Punch "has never in a single instance," says he in his "Art of England," "endeavoured to represent the beauty of the poor. On the contrary, his witness to their degradation, as inevitable consequences of their London life, is constant and, for ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... indissolubly connected in his mind with a change in the family fortunes that deprived him of the ordinary advantages and pleasures open to any average boy of even the lower middle classes. It ushered in a period of misery and degradation that he could never recall without acute suffering. The few years of happiness which he enjoyed before he was carried away to London in the stage coach "Commodore", at the age of nine, were divided from a strenuous and successful manhood by so dark a gulf as to concentrate ...
— Dickens-Land • J. A. Nicklin
... we found the omnibus that did the service de la ville, but the Colonel refused to enter it, and declared he would walk; he cared nothing for the degradation of appearing in the public streets as a prisoner marching between a couple of gendarmes. He gloried in it, he said; his desire was clearly to turn the whole thing into ridicule, and the passers-by laughed aloud at this well-dressed gentleman, ...
— The Passenger from Calais • Arthur Griffiths
... of National Council — Hail to Wyoming! — Mrs. Stanton on the Degradation of Disfranchisement; women suffer from the disgrace just as men would, State, Church and Society uphold their subordination, all must be brought into harmony with the idea of equality — Lucy Stone speaks — The Rev. Frederick ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... the view that 'personal correction',as he phrased it, was an insult or a degradation to the boy upon whom it was inflicted; and to accustom young boys to think so appeared to him to be 'positively mischievous'. 'At an age,' he wrote, 'when it is almost impossible to find a true, manly sense of the degradation of guilt or faults, where is the wisdom of encouraging ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... white-headed old man filled me with a sense of shame and degradation. What had he not done for me? How great his assistance, how kind his regards, how liberal his offices. He had rescued me from the bondage of poverty. He had put forth the hand of help, with a manly grasp of succor ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms
... good as another to the average convict; as a matter of fact, it is their only consolation in their degradation that all who come here are no better than they. The world may have misused them; but they misuse their confreres in their thoughts. The "holier than thou" attitude, intentional or otherwise, is quite the last ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... have not had five months of gout. Make yourself independent honourably, which you may do by a government. but if you will take my advice, don't accept a ministerial place when you cease to be a minister. The former is a reward due to your profession and services; the latter is a degradation. You know the haughtiness of my spirit; I give you no advice but ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... long-forgotten childhood, once sung by her mother as a cradle song! With her wretched face buried in her hands, she hears it, and clearly the past rises before her: her childhood in its innocence; her girlhood in its purity; her womanhood, her motherhood in its degradation! All the holier part of what was once herself; all that was true and noble, womanly and pure, from the deep waters of oblivion to which that damning appetite has consigned them, rise to haunt her ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... italics the words indicated, evidently to call attention to the poverty and degradation of some of "His Majesty's Justices." He had a high-sounding title to his name, ...
— From Farm House to the White House • William M. Thayer
... held:—they make men what they are. It seems as though Nature had made man's intellect depend upon their dignity, as she has made his happiness depend upon their virtue. This, then, is the law of eternal justice,—man cannot degrade woman without himself falling into degradation: he cannot elevate her without at the same time elevating himself. Let us cast our eyes over the globe! Let us observe those two great divisions of the human race, the East and the West. Half the old world remains in a state ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... "Darkness," Byron has imagined such a blind and darkling world as these legends depict; and he has imagined, too, the hunger, and the desolation, and the degradation of ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... cheating and usury throughout Hungary, may be traced back to this foul nest in the Marmaros Mountains. It would be well for the credit of the Jewish community in Hungary, as well as elsewhere, if something were done to raise these people out of the utter degradation which ...
— Round About the Carpathians • Andrew F. Crosse
... miserable effects of this system on the condition of Africa, we will now follow the poor slave through his wretched wanderings, in order to give some idea of his physical suffering, his mental and moral degradation. ...
— An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans • Lydia Maria Child
... intellectual faculties Gibeonites, hewers of wood and drawers of water to the will and affections. Wisdom must be sought for its own sake or we shall not find it. Another effect of our misologia is the degradation of reasonable sympathy into sentimentalism, which regards pain as the worst of evils, and endeavours always to remove the effects of folly and wrong-doing, without investigating the causes. That such sentimentalism is often kind only to be ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... above which, with the rapid growth of the ever-growing nuisance, no living thing will breathe with impunity. Look at our scientific machinery, which has destroyed domestic manufacture, which has substituted rottenness for strength in the thing made, and physical degradation in crowded towns for healthy and comfortable country life in the makers. The day would fail, if I should attempt to enumerate the evils which science has inflicted on mankind. I almost think it is the ultimate destiny of science to exterminate the ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... his life more proudly and vigorously and freely than the dweller in a corner-country. Do those men ever reflect, who talk so glibly of this government as too large, and as one which must inevitably be sundered, to what a degradation they calmly look forward! No; Union,—come what may,—now and ever. Greatness is to every brave man a necessity. Out on the craven and base-hearted who aspire to being less than the co-rulers of a continent. See how vile and mean are those men who in the ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... The English government had issued an order that officers holding the king's commission should rank provincial officers, and that provincial generals and field officers should have no rank when a general or field officer holding a royal commission was present. The degradation of being ranked by every whipper-snapper who might hold a royal commission by virtue, perhaps, of being the bastard son of some nobleman's cast-off mistress was more than the temper of George Washington at least could bear, and when ...
— George Washington, Vol. I • Henry Cabot Lodge
... before the commencement of the revolt, he had reached the prime of manhood, a slave, with a soul uncontaminated by the degradation which surrounded him. Living in a state of society where worse than polygamy was actually urged, we find him at this period faithful to one wife—the wife of his youth—and the father of an interesting family. Linked with such tender ties, and enlightened with some degree of education, which ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... person who had risen from nothing and suddenly become possessed of immense wealth, raised the public avidity to a perfect frenzy. At that epoch of scandal and opprobrium, there was no folly or vice in which the high society did not take the lead. The degradation of men's minds was equal to the corruption of their manners. The courtiers, even the princes of the blood, besieged the Regent to obtain shares. He flung them among them with open hands; and soon they were seen mingling in the crowds ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... truth. From the dark ages women had climbed on the slow realization of freedom, honor, chastity. As the future of nations depended upon women, so did their salvation. Women could never again be barbarians. All this modern license was a parody of love. It must inevitably end in the degradation and unhappiness of those of the generation who persisted on that downward path. Hard indeed it would be to encounter the ridicule of girls and the indifference of boys. But only through the intelligence and courage of one could there ever be ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... gazed upon the degradation of woman and the unspeakable bestiality of man till that vile and dusty hell had sickened him ...
— Athalie • Robert W. Chambers
... permitted to visit, are usually detained ten or a dozen Young Ladies—some of very high Families—sent here by their Parents or Friends for undutiful Deportment, or some other Domestic Offence. They are compelled to wear a particular Dress as a mark of Degradation; are kept apart; forced to work a certain number of hours a day; and are occasionally Whipped. Here, too, upon complaints of Extravagance, Tipsiness, &c., duly proved, can Husbands send their Wives, to be confined and receive the Discipline of the ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 3 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... solecism was it,' he broke out with energy, 'in the times preceding the empire, to call that a free country which was built upon the degradation and slavery of half of its population. Rome never was a republic. It was simply a faction of land and slave holders, who blinded and befooled the ignorant populace, by parading before them some of the forms of liberty, but kept the power in their own hands. They were a community of petty ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... not receive one penny. So, they now have an interest in prolonging my life." As he spoke he sprang up with an almost frenzied air, and, seizing Pascal by the arm, again continued. "Nor is this all! This woman—my wife—you know—you have heard the extent of her shame and degradation. Ah, well! ...
— Baron Trigault's Vengeance - Volume 2 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... about me and see this poverty, the ignorance born of lack of opportunity, the suffering, the dirt, and degradation which are in so large a measure no fault of these poor folk, I am overwhelmed at the wealth of opportunities. Here at least every talent one has to offer counts for double what it ...
— Le Petit Nord - or, Annals of a Labrador Harbour • Anne Elizabeth Caldwell (MacClanahan) Grenfell and Katie Spalding
... plenty of speculation, which in those days was novel, now and then a little scepticism. His "Alcestis" is melodrama verging on sentimental comedy, and heralding the sentimental comedy of Menander known to us in the versions of Terence. The chord of pathos he can touch well. His degradation, as the old school thought it, of the drama of Aeschylus and Sophocles, and what they deemed his pandering to vulgar taste, brought upon him the bitter satire of Aristophanes. Yet he did not win many prizes. Perhaps the vast theatre and the grand choric ...
— Specimens of Greek Tragedy - Aeschylus and Sophocles • Goldwin Smith
... and endangers a multitude of plant and animal species indigenous to the area; there is a lucrative illegal wildlife trade; air and water pollution in Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo, and several other large cities; land degradation and water pollution caused by improper mining activities; ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... sisters, and any one of half a dozen is always ready without embarrassment to take the lead, discoursing very appropriately from her Turkish Testament. This, I am told, is a rare thing in Turkey, where woman has been so long held in ignorance and degradation." ...
— History Of The Missions Of The American Board Of Commissioners For Foreign Missions To The Oriental Churches, Volume II. • Rufus Anderson
... found his highest inspiration in it. Even its pessimism as it faces the cooling of the sun and the return of the ice-caps does not degrade the pessimist: for example, the Quincy Adamses, with their insistence on modern democratic degradation as an inevitable result of solar shrinkage, are not dehumanized as the vivisectionists are. Perhaps nobody is at heart fool enough to believe that life is at the mercy of temperature: Dante was not troubled by the objection that Brunetto could not have lived ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... the sands of the deeper line to the right are tinctured a pale and sickly green by the degradation of the porphyritic traps, here towering in the largest masses yet seen; while the gravel of the left bank is warm, and lively with red grit and syenitic granite. Looking down the long and gently waving line, we feel still connected with the civilized world by the blue and purple screen of Sinai ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... while the arguments of all have little force except as they tend to the same conclusion. The point of controversy between them and their opponents is often represented as being essentially this: Shall the king of Prussia be made as powerless as the queen of England? Against such a degradation of the dignity of the house of Hohenzollern all the convictions and prejudices of the royalists revolt. Such a surrender of all personal power, they say, and say truly, was not designed by Frederick William IV. when he gave the constitution; to ask the king, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... into another." Of heredity he says: "The whole subject of inheritance is exceedingly intricate, working often in a seemingly capricious and fitful way. Qualities, both good and bad, are dropped as well as acquired, and the process ends sometimes in the degradation of the type, and the survival of the unfit rather than the fittest. The most trifling and fantastic tricks of inheritance are quoted in support of the transmutation theory; but little is said of the sudden apparition of powerful original qualities, which almost always rise like ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... and an upset is to them a greater incident than a change of administration. Their only point of interest on the road is to save the time, and see whether the coach keeps the hour. This is surely a miserable degradation of human intellect. Take my advice, my good sir, and disinterestedly contrive that once or twice a quarter your most dexterous whip shall overturn a coachful of these superfluous travellers, IN ...
— Chronicles of the Canongate • Sir Walter Scott
... Thais at the opening of this Act, where he says that he is confident of obtaining his father's consent, provided Pamphila proves to be a citizen; and, indeed, the match between them is rather a reparation of an injury done to her than a degradation ...
— The Comedies of Terence - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Notes • Publius Terentius Afer, (AKA) Terence
... but may safely sit down and laugh over it, saying, 'Very likely it is true. If so, it is very amusing; and if not—what matter?'—Then those young people are being bred up in a habit of mind which contains in itself all the capabilities of degradation and slavery, in self-conceit, hasty assertion, disbelief in nobleness, and all the other 'credulities of scepticism': parted from that past from which they take their common origin, they are parted also from each other, and become selfish, ...
— Froude's History of England • Charles Kingsley
... his mind," says the author of the Confederation of Kilkenny, "on one grand object—the freedom of the Church, in possession of all her rights and dignities, and the emancipation of the Catholic people from the degradation to which English imperialism had condemned them. The churches which the piety of Catholic lords and chieftains had erected, he determined to secure to the rightful inheritors. His mind and feelings recoiled from the idea of worshipping in crypts and catacombs; he abhorred the notion of a ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... uneasily, suspicious, without knowing why or what. But one thing was clear—to plead further with her would be self-degradation. "I have been tactless," he said to her. "Probably, if I were less in earnest, I should get on better. But, perhaps you will judge me more fairly when you think it over. I'll say only one thing more. I can't give up ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... either enticed to London from wearisomeness of his situation, or banished from home, as it is said, in consequence of his irregularities. There he assumed the profession of a player, which he considered at first as a degradation, principally, perhaps, because of the wild excesses [Footnote: In one of his sonnets he says: O, for my sake do you with fortune chide, The guilty goddess of my harmless deeds, That did not better for my life provide, Than public means which public manners breeds. And in the following:— ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... The idea of Miss Miner in planting a school here was to train up a class of Colored girls, in the midst of slave institutions, who should show forth in their culture and capabilities, to the country and to mankind, that the race was fit for something higher than the degradation which rested upon them. The amazing energy with which this frail woman prosecuted her work is well known to those who took knowledge of her career. She visited the Colored people of her district from house to house, and breathed a new life into them pertaining to the education ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... now annexes an idea of degradation to a residence non-military in France. He would deem himself humbled by the civil place at which you hint, even if you could bring him, which I doubt above all, to submit to its duties. He regards himself, from peculiar circumstances, as an established Englishman ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 3 • Madame D'Arblay
... Parliament in one section guarding the people of the realm, and securing to them trial by jury and the law of the land, and in the next section depriving Americans of those important rights; and this distinction was pronounced a brand of disgrace upon every American, a degradation below the rank of an Englishman. While the instructions claimed for each subject in America equality of political right with each subject in England, they claimed also for the General Court the dignity of a free assembly, and declared the first object of their labors to be a removal of "those ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... It proves a nobleman may be repulsed When he thinks conquest easy. I believe That woman, in her deepest degradation, Holds something sacred, something undefiled, Some pledge and keepsake of her higher nature, And, like the diamond in the dark, retains Some quenchless gleam of ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... of this miserable class, each member of which is entitled to grasp any other member's hand, by that vile degradation wherein guilty error has buried all alike. The foul fiend to whom it properly belongs must relieve us of our loathsome task. Let the bond servants of sin pass on. But neither man nor woman, in whom good predominates, will smile or sneer, ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... powers were perverted to the worst purposes, and his gross vices were unredeemed, if we are to credit the report of his most respectable contemporaries, by a single virtue. In him the papacy reached its lowest degradation. His pontificate, however, was not without its use; since that Providence, which still educes good from evil, made the scandal, which it occasioned to the Christian world, a principal spring of the glorious ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V3 • William H. Prescott
... not been by multiplication, which would be but a progress in degradation under the now well-recognized laws of evolution; but it has been in integration from a vast multiplicity toward a unity. True, all evolution has not been in this direction. There has often been degradation as exhibited in the ...
— On Limitations To The Use Of Some Anthropologic Data - (1881 N 01 / 1879-1880 (pages 73-86)) • J. W. Powell
... environmental problems (urban and rural) typical of an industrializing economy such as soil degradation, desertification, air ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... guilty of; but from the high views that I had set before me, I regarded and hid them with an almost morbid sense of shame. It was thus rather the exacting nature of my aspirations than any particular degradation in my faults, that made me what I was, and, with even a deeper trench than in the majority of men, severed in me those provinces of good and ill which divide and compound man's dual nature. In this ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 5 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... She was alive but to one idea, and that the most painful that could be suggested to a delicate mind. She had heard herself recommended to the love of a man who was indifferent to her. Could there be such a humiliation—such a degradation? Colonel Lennox's embarrassment was scarcely less; but his mother saw not the mischief she had done, and she continued to speak without his having the power to interrupt her. But her words fell unheeded ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... you had received from him?" I answer, Nature does not admit of so great a change in a wise man. Men do not change from the best to the worst; even in becoming bad, he would necessarily retain some traces of goodness; virtue is never so utterly quenched as not to imprint on the mind marks which no degradation can efface. If wild animals bred in captivity escape into the woods, they still retain something of their original tameness, and are as remote from the gentlest in the one extreme as they are in the other from those which have ...
— L. Annaeus Seneca On Benefits • Seneca
... July 15, 1833, Col. John Milton informed the War Department ... "Many of them [the Indians] are almost starved, and suffer immensely for the things necessary to the support of life, and are sinking in moral degradation. They have been much corrupted by white men who live among them, who induce them to sell to as many different individuals as they can, and then cheat them out of the proceeds."... (p. 81.) Luther Blake wrote to the War Department from Fort Mitchell, Alabama, on September ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... that guilt is still prolific; that the commission of the first ill deed, leads almost surely to the commission of a second, of a third, until the soul is filed and the heart utterly corrupted, and the wretch given wholly up to the dominion of foul sin, and plunged into thorough degradation. ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... still brilliant complexion, while his large, soft, dark eyes, his arched brow, his well-proportioned nose, his small mouth and oval cheek presented altogether one of those faces which, in spite of long centuries of physical suffering and moral degradation, still haunt the cities of Asia Minor, the isles of Greece, and the Syrian coasts. It is the archetype of manly beauty, the tradition of those races who have wandered the least from Paradise; and who, notwithstanding many vicissitudes and much misery, are still ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli
... rapprochement a etablir entre les classes qui composent le regne animal," Arch. du Museum d'histoire naturelle, Paris, 1812, pp. 73-84.) Of course, it would be necessary to apply a great many restrictions to this formula—for example, to allow for the cases of degradation and retrogression in which the nervous system passes into the background. And, moreover, with the nervous system must be included the sensorial apparatus on the one hand and the motor on the other, between which it acts as intermediary. Cf. ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... and efficiently we might purify and ennoble our social structure if we had developed, instead of abandoning, this method. Think, for instance, of the infinite loss of energy, of health, of lives, the endless degradation of physical and spiritual beauty produced in London alone by the mere failure to prevent a few million chimneys from belching soot on the great city and choking all the activities of the vastest focus of activity ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... to whom suffering is degradation. Sympathy would burn them like caustic. They are dumb on the side which seeks promiscuous fellowship. They love one person, and live or ...
— Old Kaskaskia • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... time flowed from his lips in finished state, perfect in all useful knowledge. From his arms next issued the Kshatriya, or warriors; from his breast, the seat of life, came the Vaisya, or producers—shepherds, farmers, merchants; from his foot, in sign of degradation, sprang the Sudra, or serviles, doomed to menial duties for the other classes—serfs, domestics, laborers, artisans. Take notice, further, that the law, so born with them, forbade a man of one caste ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... with his 100,000 men to add weight to their language, and the total helplessness of the older line of the Bourbons had been too evidently displayed to make their return a certainty, so that there is no reason to doubt that a firm-hearted patriot might have saved France from much of the degradation and loss inflicted on her when once the Allies had again got her at their mercy. At-the least the Bourbons might have been deprived of the revenge they sought for in taking some of the best blood of France. Better for Ney and his ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... to save from degradation and punishment accepts the mercy I offer her, and takes warning while there ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... current issues: soil degradation; overgrazing; deforestation (much of the remaining forests are being cut down for fuel and building ...
— The 1997 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... heart. And should she ever see those dear relatives or that kind friend again? Or if she did, would she be able to look them in the face as a pure and stainless girl, or would she blush in their presence with a consciousness of degradation? But she was interrupted in these painful meditations by the sound of the key turning in the lock; and a moment afterwards Mr. Tickels entered the room, and advanced towards her. On observing her improved appearance, a smile of intense satisfaction ...
— Venus in Boston; - A Romance of City Life • George Thompson
... knew and pitied all our weaknesses—By him, who has given his word to take compassion on the sinner's tears, I bid you hope for mercy. By that innocence in which you once lived, be comforted—By the sorrows you have known since your degradation, hope, that in some measure, you have atoned——By the sincerity that shone upon your youthful face when I joined your hands, and those thousand virtues you have since given proofs of, trust, that you were not born to die ...
— A Simple Story • Mrs. Inchbald
... cast upon him. There he stood, trembling, as it were, in the balance, and ready to be carried up or down by this new and most terrible trial—up into a higher sphere of virtue, or down into a deeper degradation than ...
— In School and Out - or, The Conquest of Richard Grant. • Oliver Optic
... another way to measure it. My sins are deep, my helpless miseries are deep, but they are shallow as compared with the love that goes down beneath all sin, that is deeper than all sorrow, that is deeper than all necessity, that shrinks from no degradation, that turns away from no squalor, that abhors no wickedness so as to avert its face from it. The purest passion of human benevolence cannot but sometimes be aware of disgust mingling with its pity and its efforts, but Christ's ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... people wretched? Only Bulwer in his most pathetic style could describe the miseries of that night—the moaning, the groaning, the cursing, the tumbling, the blistering, the infamous despair and degradation! I heard all the cocks in Jaffa crow; the children crying, and the mothers hushing them; the donkeys braying fitfully in the moonlight; at last I heard the clatter of hoofs below, and the hailing of men. It was three o'clock, the horses were actually come; nay, there were ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... those who murder to rob. And yet, at this present moment, there is as great a distance between me and an assassin, as there is between me and an irreproachable man. Thus, because there are beings a thousand times more degraded than I am, my degradation is to be excused in my eyes! Instead of being able to say, as formerly, I am as honest as the most honest men, I will console myself by saying I am the least degraded of the wretches among whom I am ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue
... Stops, to which we have already referred, was one of the thunderclaps of the storm; but its morrow brought the peace of Vienna, and the degradation of Austria was the death-blow of the old Germanic organisation. These societies, which had received a mortal wound in 1806 and were now controlled by the French police, instead of continuing to meet in public, were forced to seek new members in the dark. In 1811 several agents of these societies ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - KARL-LUDWIG SAND—1819 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... competing for low-priced labour, and who regard want of employment as a crime. But if it were possible for any citizen in need of money to resort to a place of public employment as a right, and there work for a week or month without degradation upon certain minimum terms, it seems fairly certain that no one would work, except as the victim of some quite exceptional ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... common Father, through a common Lord. If ever society is to be regenerated, it is by the agency of living brothers and sisters in the Lord; and every plan, however apparently wise, for recovering mankind from their degradation, and which does not make the personal ministrations of Christian men and women an essential part of it, its very life, is doomed, we think, ...
— Parish Papers • Norman Macleod
... feared it would be difficult, if not impossible, to meet the wishes of the illustrious strangers in the particular manner spoken of. The male inhabitants of the village were all warriors, to whom work of any description would be an unspeakable degradation. But he would see what could be done. If women, now, would serve the strangers' purpose as well as men, the thing could ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... these complaints. Stanhope even did not dare to deny his fault. He was allowed to demand leave of absence to go home and defend himself. He was badly received, stripped of all military rank in England and Holland, and (as well as the officers under him) was not without fear of his degradation, and was even in ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... condition of its healthy development and maturity. Without it we resort to jejune amusement, and from amusement we are hurried on to dissipation, to the card table and dram shop; and from dissipation we sink to degradation, infamy and wretchedness. Idleness is thus the fruitful mother of vice and misery. Our lives cannot exist in a state of neutrality between active good and active evil. It is, therefore, the duty of the Christian home to prepare her young members for some ...
— The Christian Home • Samuel Philips
... and rose above the fear, she knew that she could never let fear drive her into bondage. Nothing should make a sacrifice of joy to shame—to save herself she would not bring up her child in the sorrow and degradation of a loveless home.... If she had been strong enough to give up the thought of marriage for the sake of Bertie's liberty and her own self-respect, she could be strong enough now to turn from her only hope of reputation for the sake of the new life which was joy within her. It would be the worst, ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... country and their own people in order to serve the Emperor of France. It was a terrible, heart-rending spectacle presented by Germany during these last years, and which could not but fill the heart of every patriot with shame and despair. And yet this period of degradation was necessary and even salutary, for it blinded Napoleon by the glaring sunshine of his power; it rendered him overbearing and reckless; he dared every thing, because he believed he would succeed in every thing, and that the world had utterly succumbed to his power. He dared all, ...
— NAPOLEON AND BLUCHER • L. Muhlbach
... forth well equipped for the battle of life; some of them becoming ministers, local preachers, Sunday-school workers, and in many ways most useful citizens. The committee of management has the sanction of Conference. This "powerful arm of Christian work" not only rescues helpless little ones from degradation and misery; it undertakes the special training of the workers amongst the children in industrial homes and orphanages; and hence has arisen the institution in 1895 of the order of Methodist deaconesses, which is recommended by Conference to Connexional sympathy and confidence, the deaconesses rendering ...
— Great Britain and Her Queen • Anne E. Keeling
... devote above twenty pages to instances of the superstition and credulity of the Jews about the time of Christ. The contents of these pages would be amusing if they did not reveal such deep mental degradation in a race which Christians regard as sacred, because of God's dealings with ...
— The Lost Gospel and Its Contents - Or, The Author of "Supernatural Religion" Refuted by Himself • Michael F. Sadler
... its degradation, flashed on the mind of Augusta. Without a question or comment, she motioned to the sofa in the parlor, and her husband was laid there. She locked the street door, and when the last retreating footstep had died away, she turned to the sofa, and stood gazing in fixed and almost stupefied silence ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... foremost in the ranks of the Abolitionists, battled for the freedom and rights of the enslaved race. You have lived, with many compeers, to see the glorious result of your labors in redeeming from the infamy and degradation of chattelism 4,000,000 slaves. That done, your attention was turned to the greater question—in view of numbers—of woman's emancipation from ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... dropped the name of Braddell. She shrank from proclaiming those second spousals, sullied by the degradation to which they had exposed her, and the suspicions implied in the inquest on her husband, until the hour for acknowledging her son should arrive. She resumed, therefore, the name of Dalibard, and by that we will continue to call her. Nor ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... with delight a character far beneath his ability. Other actors will not condescend to do this or else fear to let themselves down by doing so. Warren had no timidities about assuming a lesser part, nor did he deem it condescension. Artists of questionable greatness may deem it a degradation to personate any save a leading part. Warren felt that he did not let himself down, he raised the character to his own elevation. From this it follows that no great actor within my recollection had undertaken such a variety ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 23, October, 1891 • Various
... be awakened, inspired, concentrated," she went on. "That is the true task of real agitators. One has got to give up one's life to it. The degradation of servitude, the absolutist lies must be uprooted and swept out. Reform is impossible. There is nothing to reform. There is no legality, there are no institutions. There are only arbitrary decrees. There is only a handful ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... colonies, and which had been purchased by our best blood and treasures, and by truckling to the defiance and insult hurled at us by the Americans, cut off those sources of power and opulence, and submit to a degradation from the rank we held in the political system of Europe; or, whether we should, by the full exertion of our power, preserve those advantages, assert our ancient supremacy, restore the authority of the ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... Jesus Christ;" and he speaks of "majesty," "honour," and "glory," which are the appendages of a kingdom, and are to be the characteristics of the second advent of Jesus, in contrast with the meanness, poverty, and degradation of his first appearance in our world. Those, therefore, who say that the transfiguration had a typical reference either to the effusion of the Spirit on the day of pentecost, or to the destruction of Jerusalem, ...
— The Church of England Magazine - Volume 10, No. 263, January 9, 1841 • Various
... aspects of these Indian customs that are of peculiar interest. In my Ridgeway essay (op. cit. supra) I referred to the means by which in Nubia the degradation of the oblong Egyptian mastaba gave rise to the simple stone circle. This type spread to the west along the North African littoral, and also to the Eastern desert and Palestine. At some subsequent time mariners from the Red Sea ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... number of the choicest favorites of his prince, or whether he were offensive and odious to him, he demeaned himself in neither condition with moderation; but if he was advanced he was intolerably insolent, and in his degradation not submissive and peaceable in his ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... by the Founder of Christianity; the order was never abrogated and yet most Christians are not aware that Sabbath, or "Sawbath," means Saturn's day, the "Shiyar" of the older Arabs. And to complete its degradation "Sabbat" in French and German means a criaillerie, a "row," a disorder, an abominable festival of Hexen (witches). This monstrous absurdity can be explained only by aberrations of sectarian zeal, of ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... who has drunk more deeply he is not a man whom I envy. My purse suffered, my character suffered, my constitution suffered, stimulants became a necessity to me, I was a creature from whom my memory recoils. And it was at that time, the time of my blackest degradation, that God sent into my life the gentlest, sweetest spirit that ever descended as a ministering angel from above. She loved me, broken as I was, loved me, and spent her life in making a man once more of that which had degraded itself to the ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... women coming down a path, one of them old, and the other younger, with a child in her arms. Both had faces eaten with famine and hardened with sin, and both had reached that stage of degradation, much lower in a woman than a man, when all care for dress is lost. As they came down they neared a grave, where some pious friend or relative had laid a wreath of immortelles, and put a bell glass over it, as is the custom. The effect of that ring of dull yellow among so many blackened ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... through the war I had seen her at intervals, enjoying life, finding the war a sort of lark, and I had hated her because she didn't care for the death and torture of men, for the possible defeat of her country, or the already achieved economic, moral, and intellectual degradation of the whole of Europe. She had merely profiteered out of it all, and had a good time. I remembered now my anger and my scorn; but I remembered too the squareness and the whiteness of her forehead under her newly-cut hair, that leave when I ...
— Potterism - A Tragi-Farcical Tract • Rose Macaulay
... stood at the edge of the ice beating linen, or did any drudgery she could find to do, in order to earn a little money to pay for herself and her baby at the tinsmith's, that, from her deepest degradation, she had risen at one step to the rank of an exceptionally sought-after and ...
— One of Life's Slaves • Jonas Lauritz Idemil Lie
... of course—not at all. But it will make all the difference to the atmosphere in which it is conducted. One can imagine how certain persons are already gloating over it—what use they will make of it—how they will magnify and embroider everything. And such an odious story! It is the degradation ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... western third of the island - Haiti. The French colony, based on forestry and sugar-related industries, became one of the wealthiest in the Caribbean, but only through the heavy importation of African slaves and considerable environmental degradation. In the late 18th century, Haiti's nearly half million slaves revolted under Toussaint L'OUVERTURE and after a prolonged struggle, became the first black republic to declare its independence in 1804. Haiti ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... battles with the railroad conductors, and being roughly handled in not a few instances, proscription was at last abandoned; and the "Jim Crow car"—set up for the degradation of colored people—is nowhere found in New England. This result was not brought about without the intervention of the people, and the threatened enactment of a law compelling railroad companies to respect the rights of travelers. Hon. Charles Francis ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass
... hit it with all the might of our civilization, but only succeed in scattering it into a dozen other forms. We hit slavery through a great civil war. Did we destroy it? No, we only changed it into hatred between sections of the country: in the South, into political corruption and chicanery, the degradation of the blacks through peonage, unjust laws, unfair and cruel treatment; and the degradation of the whites by their resorting to these practices, the paralyzation of the public conscience, and the ever over-hanging dread of what the future may bring. Modern civilization hit ...
— The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man • James Weldon Johnson
... be made. Emasculation was a necessary first condition of service in her worship. (Catullus, Attys.) The Latin literature of the silver and bronze ages contains many references to castration. Juvenal and Martial have lavished bitter scorn upon this form of degradation, and Suetonius and Statius inform us that Domitian prohibited the practice, but it is in the "Amoures" attributed to Lucian that we find a passage so closely akin to the one forming a basis of this note, that it is ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... races few things are more important than to preserve them from the terrible physical and moral degradation resulting from the liquor traffic. We are doing all we can to save our own Indian tribes from this evil. Wherever by international agreement this same end can be attained as regards races where ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... South bear in mind that at the North the colour of the skin does not take away the feeling of brotherhood, and though it is a badge of degradation in station and intellect, yet it is oftener regarded with pity and sympathy than with contempt? Cannot the South remember their generous feelings for the Greeks and Poles, and imagine that some such feelings may be awakened for the African race, among a people who do ...
— An Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism - With reference to the duty of American females • Catharine E. Beecher
... dollars; thus a hundred dollars worth of bad whiskey, if judiciously traded, would net the white dealer a thousand dollars cash. And the traffic went on, to the depletion of the Indian forests and the degradation of ...
— The Moccasin Maker • E. Pauline Johnson
... plateau. They have descended in their flight upon the original coast dwellers, adding to the general condition of political disruption, multiplying the number of small weak tribes, increasing the occasions for intertribal wars, and furthering the prevailing degradation. The seaboard lowlands of Sierra Leone, Liberia and the Ivory Coast have all suffered thus In historic times.[516] All this region was the original home of the low, typical "Guinea Nigger" of the Southern plantation. The coasts of Oregon and California showed a parallel to this in their ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... all its phases, the result being a hatred of it, which he hopes and trusts he shall retain till the moment when his spirit quits the body. Popery is the great lie of the world; a source from which more misery and social degradation have flowed upon the human race, than from all the other sources from which those evils come. It is the oldest of all superstitions; and though in Europe it assumes the name of Christianity, it existed and flourished amidst the Himalayan ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... contrast to the sordid misery and degradation of this last refuge of the desperate Hodder saw the lofty, panelled smoking room at Francis Ferguson's, and was listening again to Wallis Plimpton's cynical amusement as to how he and Everett Constable and Eldon Parr himself ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... develop them. In ways so delicate that the most sensitive pride could not resent the favor, these true gentlefolk showed Polly their respect and regard, put many pleasures in her way, and when they paid her for her work, gave her also the hearty thanks that takes away all sense of degradation even from the humblest service, for money so earned and paid sweetens the daily bread it buys, and makes the mutual obligation a ...
— An Old-fashioned Girl • Louisa May Alcott
... come for you?" I whispered, alluding to a story I had told her the last time she had visited me; a story in which a girl, who had waited all her life in rags and degradation for the lordly knight who was to raise her from a hovel to a throne, died just as her one lover, an honest peasant-lad whom she had discarded in her pride, arrived at her door with the fortune he had spent all his days in amassing for ...
— The Leavenworth Case • Anna Katharine Green
... after Max Schurz's affair, he felt he had already touched the lowest depths of degradation. He knew now that he had touched a still lower one. Oh! horrible abyss of self-abasement!—he had taken the blood-money. And yet, it was to save Dot's life! Herbert was right, after all: quite right. Yes, yes, all hope was gone: the environment ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... in divine natures possess a fabricative power, but with us they are only gnostic, and no longer demiurgic, through the defluxion of our wings, or degradation of our intellectual powers. For, as Plato says in the Phaedrus, when the winged powers of the soul are perfect and plumed for flight, she dwells on high, and in conjunction with divine natures governs the world. In the Timaeus, he manifestly asserts that the demiurgus implanted these dianoetic forms ...
— Introduction to the Philosophy and Writings of Plato • Thomas Taylor
... which in the earlier acts could be superficially good-humoured and sometimes royally courteous. But now the atmosphere of blood, which pervades the whole tragedy, has entered into the man and subdued him to its own nature; and an indescribable degradation, a slackness and puffiness, has overtaken his features. He has breathed the air of carnage, and supped full of horrors. Lady Macbeth complains of the smell of blood on her hand: Macbeth makes no complaint—he has ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... is a badge in coat-armour, indicating some kind of degradation or dishonour. It is called ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... 13.—Oxford 1-5. We were in the theatre. Ward was like himself, honest to a fault, as little like an advocate in his line of argument as well could he, and strained his theology even a point further than before. The forms are venerable, the sight imposing; the act is fearful [the degradation of Ward], if it did not leave strong hope ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... present to Maurice, drew around him a protecting circle which nothing vile could enter, and, wherever his own eyes turned, it seemed to him that her heavenly eyes followed. Could he profane their holy gaze by fixing his upon scenes of captivating degradation and rose-crowned vice? ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
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